Honoring Mary Kate Bluestein

By Eric Davis

Kate seemed out of place when she first arrived at school in 1977.  This was because she dressed like an adult—tailored suits in solid colors: Fifth Avenue, not Harvard Square. At Hancock, I noticed that she did not play baseball. The desk in her office was not a mess. As a critical reader, she was an ace from the start. I don’t think I have ever heard her get lost in the midst of a sentence. 
   
On occasion, a wicked gleam comes into Kate’s eye. Once, at announcement time, she read a passage from Wuthering Heights in which the narrator, newly arrived at that inhospitable lair in the uplands, tries to make a cheery remark about a cushion in a darkened corner “full of something like cats.” His remark is met by scorn, for “unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits” instead.  This was the origin of what has become The Dead Bunny Award, given each spring to the student couple who, as they take their ease in the Commonwealth lobby, most nearly resemble those soft, dear, dead animals.

A Commonwealth graduate, now a professor of English, told me the other day that it was Kate who showed her what could make literature the pursuit of a lifetime. “For three years she gave me hard-nosed criticism,” she said, “and at some point I realized that in a way that was cordial but not at all personal she was keeping me company in the presence of all those texts. I’d never experienced intellectual companionship before, and I’d never thought of it as something that the writing of essays in school could bring about. But there it was. Why would you ever want to write a book if something like that never happened as a result?"

A certain elegance, then; intellectual comradeship; the pleasure of the brief but wicked gleam; the hard word when you need to hear it. What the word “colleague” might mean at its best. Kate: in the words of Claudius (an older person, like ourselves): “For this, much thanks.”

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